Dot (Araminta Hall)

water and the conversation stopped.
    The next day was their last and Tony seemed as jittery as Alice. She felt him staring at her as she ran to the sea and his hands shook as he touched her body in the cool water.
    ‘You really are so beautiful,’ he said as they stood waist-deep in the ocean. ‘Don’t ever let anyone tell you otherwise.’
    But there won’t ever be anyone else, Alice wanted to shout, please don’t say that.
    After lunch they went to their favourite rock where Alice lay back into the sand but Tony stayed sitting, hugging his knees. ‘Have you told your mother about me yet?’ he asked, letting sand run idly between his fingers.
    ‘No, she wouldn’t understand.’ Alice didn’t want to talk, she just wanted him to lie next to her. But his next question shocked her.
    ‘Is there someone else? You can tell me, you know, I wouldn’t mind.’
    ‘Wouldn’t you?’
    ‘I’d rather know.’
    ‘Of course there isn’t. Why, have you got a girlfriend or something?’ Alice imagined a string of girls trailing Tony like confetti wherever he went.
    He smiled over his shoulder at her. ‘No, no. Only you.’
    Alice sat up as well and wondered if they were stuck not because of her, but because of him. I have approached this whole encounter like a job interview, she realised, all the time worried that I wasn’t good enough. Maybe he is feeling the exact same way. Maybe the fact that I haven’t asked him anything about himself is troubling him, not soothing him. It was the first time that Alice had considered herself from the outside and this new perspective shamed her. She placed her hand on his bony back, curved and dotted by the ridges in his spine and he felt warm and sticky from the salt. ‘Where are you from?’ she asked simply.
    ‘Manchester.’
    ‘What are you doing here?’
    He shrugged under her hand and the movement pained her in its loneliness. ‘Just had to get away. My dad’s a wanker and my mum’s what you might call harassed. I’m the fourth boy and she never made any bones about the fact that she wanted a girl. Not that she didn’t love us, but she was pretty spent by the time it got to me.’
    ‘I’m sorry,’ said Alice and she didn’t think she’d ever spoken truer words.
    ‘What about your dad? Why’s it just you and your weird mother?’
    ‘He died when I was nine. He had a boat and got caught in a storm. Swept overboard. They never found his body.’
    Tony turned round at this. ‘No, really? That’s shit.’
    And it was shit, shitter than Alice had perhaps realised before. She saw herself standing next to her mother at her father’s memorial, in her black dress and little white gloves, swallowing her tears, desperate for a shred of comfort from Clarice, who just looked forward, a veil over her eyes, her hands clasped in front of her.
    ‘Don’t cry,’ Tony said and she felt the tears on her cheeks.
    ‘Sorry.’
    ‘No, I didn’t mean that.’ He leant forward and kissed the tracks they had made on her face. ‘Look at the two of us,’ he said. ‘I’m never having kids. Parents just fuck you up.’
    And as much to stop him from saying words that Alice could not bear to hear as anything else, she pulled him towards her and something about the way she kissed him or the pitch of the seagulls’ screeches or maybe just the way the planets were moving round the earth gave Tony the courage to take the movement as far as they both wanted.
    Sometimes you can feel summer ending in the whip of the wind or the coolness of a morning or a cloud passing over the sun. The news was filled with stories of their Indian summer, blown to them like a piece of magic from a mystical land, but still it happened two weeks after their holiday and, with the season’s change, Alice felt a terror which she didn’t know how to articulate. Sooner or later she would have to stop going into Cartertown for pretend interviews and actually get a job. In just a few weeks it would be too cold to meet on Conniton Hill and the boarding house Tony lived in didn’t allow visitors. Their meetings would have to take place in pubs and cinemas, crowded with other people, and eventually he would lose interest and meet a girl who was less complicated and happy to introduce him to her parents.
    By November it was as if the summer had never happened and Tony shivered in the wind. Alice felt him slipping from her with every meeting until one day, on Conniton Hill, he wouldn’t meet her eye and so